Honeybee dances and symbolic animal communication

A bee finds food, returns to the nest, and dances. Other bees then find the food. That gives us a useful question before we encounter any scientific names: how does the dance tell them where to go?

Aristotle observed the recruiting behavior, but observing that communication occurs is different from explaining it. Von Frisch and his colleagues made the next advance. They could decipher the pattern of a dance and work out the food's location. The dance was carrying information, not merely showing that a bee was excited.

What remained unclear was how the other bees received that information. Wenner and Esch found low-frequency sounds produced by wing vibrations. That could explain communication inside a completely dark nest: a bee need not see another bee to hear it. But scientists' mistaken belief that bees could not hear blocked acceptance of that explanation. A mistaken background assumption can make a promising account seem unavailable.

Wenner then proposed odors carried back from the food source. Think about someone returning home smelling of pizza. That might tell you something about the food, but how would it give you directions to the restaurant? That is a useful question about the proposed mechanism, not proof by itself that smell cannot help.

The actual evidence comes next. Gould showed that a forager could send bees somewhere the forager had never visited. It could not have brought back the scent of that particular site. This challenges the claim that carrying an odor from the destination is necessary. Finally, a dancing robot helped establish the essential role of sound. We have moved from observing a behavior to testing explanations of how it works.

A's main point: Sounds produced during honeybee dances play an essential role in communicating food locations.

B widens the view. All animals communicate in some sense, it says, but some communicate symbolically. A symbol represents something else. A call can stand for a predator, just as a word can refer to something that is not physically present. We don't need a detailed theory of human language to understand that relationship.

The vervet experiment makes it concrete. A recording of an eagle alarm makes monkeys look up; a snake alarm makes them look down. They aren't merely reacting to any frightening noise in the same way. The different responses suggest that the calls represent different predators. The recording can carry that information without a monkey actually making the call at that moment.

Honeybees provide another example. Their dances represent a food source's distance, direction, and quality. B credits von Frisch with deciphering that code and, like A, rejects the proposed reliance on odors from the food source.

Then Gould tests something different. He trains foragers to find food on a boat in a lake. Those bees return and communicate the location, but the nestmates do not go. The suggested explanation is that flowers do not normally grow there. Picture the other bees responding that a lake is an unlikely place to find flowers. That captures the point that they do not blindly follow every message; it does not establish that they consciously accuse the forager of lying.

B's main point: Some animals, including honeybees and vervet monkeys, use signals that symbolically represent specific information.

The accounts overlap without doing exactly the same job. A concentrates on the mechanism of honeybee communication and the studies that established it. B uses honeybees within a broader discussion of symbolic animal communication. Keep Gould's two findings separate: A concerns sending bees to an unvisited site; B concerns failure to recruit them to a visited but implausible site.